The present invention relates to the field of driver safety and, more particularly, to automation of driver monitoring to facilitate the process of aggregating, processing, and displaying driver safety information in an effort to promote safe driving.
Vehicle accidents and/or incidents (e.g. traffic violations, property damage, or injury) can be rather expensive as there are many costs that can be incurred as a result of an accident or incident. Direct costs include medical care, legal expenses, property damage and lost productivity. In addition, there may be costs associated with pain and suffering of injured parties. Such costs can be difficult to forecast and calculate.
Collected data supports the proposition that vehicular accidents and incidents are costly. For example, in 1994 over 325,000 workers and their dependents in the United States were injured in on-the-job automobile crashes. Comparatively, nearly 5,000,000 were injured in off-the-job crashes. Recent studies have found that the cost to an employer of an on-the-job automobile crash is $25,000, while off-the-job accidents can cost an employer $20,000. As a result, companies spend over $100 billion a year on crash-related medical care. An additional $9 billion goes to sick leave and insurance.
These costs can be broken down categorically. For example, there may be health fringe benefit costs associated with vehicle accidents and/or incidents. These are the costs paid by employers because of illness or injury. Generally, medical insurance, social security and private disability insurance, dependent coverage, sick leave, physical rehabilitation, life and survivor insurance all fall into this category of costs. There may also be non-fringe costs including motor vehicle property damage and liability insurance. Other property losses include vehicle contents and third party losses. In addition, legal expenses, car rental costs, police, fire and ambulance services all contribute to non-fringe costs. Furthermore, vehicle accidents and/or incidents can contribute to lost productivity by injured employees and co-workers. There are also costs associated with hiring replacement personnel and training costs for training replacement personnel.
In certain circumstances, employers pay workers extra for risky jobs. While this cost may seem negligible in some areas, it is real. Because many people avoid jobs with significant driving involved, the cost of hiring those who will drive rises. As such, there exists a real wage premium for the risk associated with driving. This cost is born when attending to vehicle accidents and/or incidents. There are also administrative costs that arise from vehicular accidents and/or incidents. For example, there are costs in administrating and processing paperwork, phone calls, reimbursement and repair programs, and documentation for accidents and/or incidents. In dollars, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that each fatal accident results in $55,000 in administrative costs to employers.
Further, accidents and/or incidents can result in a need for substitute labor, time wasted in rescheduling, and the need for additional supervisory efforts. Statistics show that the disruption due to the loss of an employee as a result of a deadly crash can be as much as $510,000 per death. Also, it has been shown that lost productivity from automobile crashes costs the US economy $42 billion a year.
Moreover, there are significant opportunity costs that arise from a vehicular accident and/or incident. Simply stated, opportunity costs are costs that are attributed to a decision resulting in less profit than had an alternative more-profitable decision been made. For example, driving a car such that you crash it is a choice. The negative ramifications of the crash include opportunity costs. For instance, drivers lose time due to injury. In addition, drivers also lose time to fill out forms, manage repairs, rent alternative transportation, etc.
The overall cost to society of automobile crashes can be astronomical. For example, in 1999 the total cost of crashes and injuries in the US was $175 billion. These costs are leveraged to society at large and not just to the causes of crashes. For instance, society is charged with paying for the police force required to attend to vehicle accidents and/or incidents, the costs of supporting emergency response, costs associated with keeping our courts in order to adjudicate over vehicular accidents and/or incidents, as well as costs to support state-supported health care. In addition, the lost taxes on lost wages are significant. Most important, however is the fact that the insurance costs (either direct or indirect) of crashes are borne by society at large. Insurance spreads these costs very effectively so that everyone who drives pays almost equally for everyone who crashes.
In response to the significant costs resulting from accidents and/or incidents, a number of preventive measures have been developed. Among these preventive measures are driver safety programs that educate drivers to engage in safe driving, thereby reducing the amount of accidents and/or incidents. However, the cost effectiveness of these safety programs is open to much debate.
Traditional driver safety programs can offer various degrees of complexity from parents teaching their child how to drive on a neighborhood street, to more formalized programs in which a pre-defined curriculum for driving safety is taught to drivers. A commonality amongst these programs is that they are proactive. That is, education is leveraged to those drivers that are suspected to be in need of driving safety education (e.g. traffic school). Such programs prescribe cautions that are generally wise and teach generalized techniques. As a result, however, the content tends to be irrelevant to the lecturees"" particular driving rehabilitation needs. That is, a driver may have a hard time stopping at stop signs and may be required by a governing administrative authority (e.g. department of transportation) to attend a class on driving safety. However, the driving safety class is generalized so that it addresses stopping at stop signs very briefly so as to cover a wide range of driving issues. As a result, the driver attending such a class receives little benefit from the education provided.
Anecdotal data supports the poor efficacy of current driver safety programs. For example, even with driver education, there seems to be a tremendous amount of vehicular accidents and incidents. It is no secret that driving has become a preferred activity for commuters. However, even with the amount of driving that occurs, it has been determined that most accidents do not result in serious injury or in fatalities. In the same breath, there are accidents that do produce serious injury and fatalities. So much so that around 42,000 people died in 1999 as a result of vehicular accidents. Simply stated, with the amount of driving that occurs, even proportionately rare events occur on some frequent basis. The goal of current driver safety programs has been to reduce the amount of accidents by proactively educating drivers. However, current practices are ineffective as they do not predict and rehabilitate drivers"" accident trends.
Current driving safety programs will typically contain a driver education portion and driver monitoring portion. The driver education is leveraged to drivers through publications, seminars, and behind the wheel training. Comparatively, driver monitoring may be realized through manual analysis of driver accident and/or incident information. As is imagined, manual analysis is a time intensive and laborious practice that demands significant care and attention. Currently, with the best driver education and best monitoring, today""s driver safety programs fall short of significantly improving and promoting driver safety for a number of reasons. First, the training is not targeted to individual driver needs. Driver failures are not uniformly measured and corrected. Further, driver education is deemed inappropriate and unimportant by the participants. Also, the training that is provided is not consistently applied to all drivers. When driver education is received, the education is undocumented and there is rarely follow up driver education. From an administrative stand-point, driver education is cumbersome and requires significant resources. Also, from a cost perspective, effective driver education and monitoring can be rather expensive. Current practices are further ineffective because driver safety data is slowly gathered and analyzed resulting in time lags between the accident and/or incident and driver rehabilitation.
From a driving safety educational material context, conventional driver safety programs involve newsletters, pamphlets, manuals, and all sorts of printed material. The subject matter of these publications typically instruct drivers about speeding, alcohol, aggression, seat belts, braking, cell phones, buffer zones, defensive driving, foul weather, intersections, highway driving, night driving, pedestrians, and haste. These are only a few of the key subjects that are covered. Although these publishing efforts help, they are almost never delivered to the correct audience at the needed time. When the appropriate message reaches its intended audience, other distracting messages usually surround the intended message.
Moreover, with current life pace, drivers have little time, if any, to attend to reviewing and, more importantly, retaining these intended messages. For example, ensuring that safety educational materials is read by a salesman that has an unmet quota is a difficult task, unless the intended audience is personally supervised. The costs and inconvenience of such supervision is much too high for current business environments. Specifically, the supervisor is left to make judgments about drivers, administer education and track performance. The administration of such tasks is increasingly impractical. As a result, what may be considered valuable driving safety information is put to the wayside and the driver is often left to continue driving until a more serious event occurs (e.g. a fatal accident).
The same shortcomings are realized by driver safety messages delivered via audiotape, CD ROMs, and videos. Driver safety information, whether taught by a concerned parent or emailed to an entire sales force, is generally ignored because it is not customized and/or tailored for the intended audience. Further, the audience generally considers such information inappropriate to them.
More advanced training programs involve behind-the-wheel training. Behind-the-wheel training offers the advantage of demanding the full attention of the student for some part of the teaching experience. Whether one-on-one or in small groups, being taught to drive cars by actually driving them assists in drivers focusing on safety and can significantly assist in the learning process. However, these training programs also suffer shortcomings. First, they are usually proactive and as such they do not address specific driver needs. Secondly, they tend to be treated as a recreational activity resulting in a less than serious attitude thereby affecting the learning process. Lastly, they are relatively expensive and as such are not offered extensively.
Comparatively, there are driving safety programs that are reactive in nature. Reactive systems promise to deliver appropriate driver safety training to individuals by analyzing their behavior and responding to it. Thus, monitoring drivers individually is essential to avoiding the problems of proactive driver safety education. Monitoring drivers manually (or with simple computer aids like spreadsheets) is inadequate, however, especially when monitored populations are large. Current manual and computer assisted monitoring systems include a variety of sorting and analytical methods. These methods range from manually ferreting out driver records from piles and piles of paper to cursory trend analysis on simple computer spreadsheets. These methods are also inaccurate as they require averaging, generalization, and do not allow for fine distinction analysis. Moreover, current reactive practices do not lend themselves to quick response times rendering them ineffective in quickly rehabilitating offending drivers.
Specifically, current driver training systems and methods cannot accurately analyze or quickly update the complex data that is involved. Current drawbacks include input delays, input errors, manual and/or semi-manual analysis of driver data, vague classifications, simplistic sorting and judgment errors. As a result, inconsistency abounds. Also, record keeping is spotty at best with current systems and methods. Generally, data that flows from governmental jurisdictions to accident-reporting agencies, leasing companies and insurance companies are slowly absorbed and converted for use. Further, since driver event data is not standardized from one state to the next, raw driver event data generally has disparate formats, rendering analysis a difficult task at best. Because of such drawbacks and shortcomings, responses to driver offenses (e.g. remediation) are often too late to be useful.
From the foregoing, it is appreciated that there exists a need for systems and methods to overcome limitations of prior art driver safety programs. By having systems and methods that automatically collect and analyze driver behavior and leverage driving safety information, driving safety may be better promoted and realized. Such is the goal of the present invention.
The present invention provides systems and methods that automate driver behavior analysis and driving safety information delivery. In an illustrative implementation, the present invention comprises a computing application operating in a computing environment. In operation, the illustrative computing application accepts and/or collects records of driver performance and analyzes the risk levels and weaknesses of drivers based on those records. Upon a change in risk level for a particular driver and/or group of drivers, the computing application communicates remediation materials and other responses to drivers. In a reporting capacity, the present invention is capable of communicating information about monitored drivers to participating drivers and administrators. For example, information relating to drivers"" behavior, drivers"" risk levels, critical events, remediation activities, and system use may be communicated.
The exemplary computing application embodying a preferred embodiment of the present invention may comprise a Web-based computing application having specific areas dedicated for content and interface features offered to drivers and specific areas dedicated for content and interface features offered to administrators of drivers (e.g. a fleet manager). Within the drivers"" dedicated areas participating drivers are offered, in real-time, content relating to that driver""s event history, risk level, and educational needs. The present invention may exploit various communication means to communicate such information and is capable of tracking driver interaction with the computing application.
Simultaneous with the above, the present invention offers analytical features that perform analysis and generate reports on driver information. That is, among other things, the present invention is capable of monitoring changes in driver performance and educational activity and testing by and of drivers. Further, the present invention is capable of providing detailed summarized reports of various driver information, as well as, storage of all monitored events, evidence of communications between the computing system and drivers, drivers actions, and correspondence. This information may be accessed and manipulated as desired by an administrator (e.g. fleet manager), for example.